Carriers and Service Providers (SPs) face increasing consumer demand for various services associated with multi-media data (such as voice, video or IP data). Each service may be associated with different types of data and be provided by any one of a variety of different vendors, and thus each may support slightly different operating needs and have different characteristics. Because services are associated with different vendors, management of an aggregated service set is complicated, often degrading the levels of service recovery and restoration that can be provided to a consumer.
In order to satisfy the increasing demand for these divergent services, multi-media solutions provided by the carriers and service providers are becoming increasingly complex and expensive. However, carriers and service providers generally prefer a less complex network and services infrastructure in order to reduce Operations Expenditures (OpEx) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the network. This is a problem because the types of multi-media services that SPs, carriers and the emerging service brokers are requesting represent a new breed of services, having differing properties from their predecessors. For example, while current services are provided with a relatively static and long life span, it is becoming desirable to offer services having a short, dynamic life span. The future services should be managed with minimal human intervention, with the number of services being provided in the network being easily scalable in magnitude. The types of services to be provided are also changing from merely transport, connectivity and voice services to include multi-media, heterogeneous services capable of relying on location, presence and availability of the consumer. As more diverse services are consumed for shorter time periods, the overall costs of the services will be reduced, requiring a dynamic billing structure capable of being supported on a pay per use or credit based schemes. Service quality may be controlled not merely on a transport level, but also using other types of service properties such as Quality of Experience (QoE), subscribers' behavior, available features and transaction rate. Due to the large number of services which are to be made available over multiple domains it will become desirable to aggregate the services through hierarchical nesting. Enhanced security capability should be provided, to enable service provider brokering to satisfy end-consumer needs. In addition, the ability to make services available on multiple access devices and access networks, supporting a plurality of business models, will be required.
It is unlikely that the expected service characteristics of high scalability, problem solving speed, complexity, rapid integration, security, price and significantly reduced OpEx can be realized on existing operational support systems (OSS). At present, management of connectivity functionality (for example, a L1-L4 network stack) is partially supported using a variety of differing management methods, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) protocols and information models. While current research is being done into improving performance of services at an enterprise level, the solutions do not address the unique issues associated with delivering the new breed of multi-media services (MMS) at a carrier and SP level. Accordingly, it is therefore desirable to identify a method and apparatus for optimizing and simplifying management aspects of multi-vendor, multi-media networks & services to reduce OpEx and TCO of the network infrastructure.